page_title: Western world
section_title: Ancient Greek-Hellenistic worlds (13th–1st centuries BC)
hierarchical_section_title: Western world / Historical divisions / Ancient Greek-Hellenistic worlds (13th–1st centuries BC)
caption_attribution_description: The distribution of satrapies in the Macedonian empire after the Settlement in Babylon summer/fall 323 BC Image:Hellenistic world blank.png used as base map
context_page_description: The Western world, also known as the West, refers to various regions, nations and states, depending on the context, most often consisting of the majority of Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The Western world is also known as the Occident, in contrast to the Orient, or Eastern world. It might mean the Northern half of the North–South divide. Western civilization is commonly said to include: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, all European member countries of the EU and EFTA, plus European microstates.
  Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization—Greece having heavily influenced Rome—the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science, aesthetics, as well as building designs and proportions and architecture; the latter due to its influence on art, law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western civilization is also strongly associated with Christianity, which is in turn shaped by Hellenistic philosophy, Judaism and Roman culture.
context_section_description: Ancient Greek civilization had been growing in the first millennium BC into wealthy poleis, so-called city-states (geographically loose political entities which in time, inevitably end giving way to larger organisations of society, including the empire and the nation-state) such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, by Middle and Near Eastern ones (Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician Tyre and Sidon; the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes).
  The then Hellenic division between the barbarians (term used by Ancient Greeks for all non-Greek-speaking people) and the Greeks contrasted in many societies the Greek-speaking culture of the Greek settlements around the Mediterranean to the surrounding non-Greek cultures. Herodotus considered the Persian Wars of the early 5th century BC a conflict of Europa versus Asia (which he considered all land north and east of the Sea of Marmara, respectively). The Greeks would highlight the lack of freedom in the Persian world, something that they viewed as antithetical to their culture.
  The terms "West" and "East" were not used by any Greek author to describe that conflict. The anachronistic application of those terms to that division entails a stark logical contradiction, given that the term "West" has been used to distinguish Latin-speaking peoples from their Greek-speaking neighbors.
  Greek culture is said to have influenced Roman civilization in all aspects of society, from architecture to philosophy, art and war.
  According to a few writers, the future conquest of parts of the Roman Empire by Germanic peoples and the subsequent dominance by the Western Christian Papacy (which held combined political and spiritual authority, a state of affairs absent from Greek civilization in all its stages), resulted in a rupture of the previously existing ties between the Latin West and Greek thought, including Christian Greek thought.
caption: The Ancient Hellenistic Greek world from 323 BC
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